A FAMILIAR cast of BBC heavyweights has been assembled as serious contenders to succeed David Dimbleby as presenter of Question Time. They include Andrew Neil, Victoria Derbyshire (my own favourite), Kirsty Wark and Emily Maitlis.

The presenter’s chair has been the sole preserve of English white, male Oxford graduates, each of whom were elected president of those assorted student societies that you are expected to join if you are seeking high political office or an important job with the BBC.

Only that tiny 0.001 per cent of the UK population who belong to this establishment within the establishment has been deemed sufficiently pukka to host this, the UK’s most important political show.

I’d expect Dimbleby’s successor to be a woman and not merely as a long overdue move to embed ideas of gender equality in the upper reaches of the UK’s most gilded of public sector organisations. The show has, in recent years, been characterised by a wretched tendency for guests, especially white male politicians, to wreck a promising line of discussion by shouting over their adversaries on the panel. I’d hope that a female presenter might impose a more disciplined and reasonable approach to the proceedings.

Wark, Derbyshire and Maitlis are among a gifted and experienced group of women broadcast journalists who all deserve an opportunity to engrave their personality on Question Time.

All of these though, belong to the same narrow field of the UK’’s media and political elite and, even if they didn’t, they would soon be chivvied into line by a production team that seems to have taken a sacred and collective vow of fealty to the establishment that favoured them with such jobs.

So numerous have been Nigel Farage’s appearances on Question Time that for a while it seemed he was moonlighting in the position of Ukip leader. The overwhelming majority of journalists who appear on the show seem to have been chosen on the basis that they attended the same Oxford drinking clubs as members of the production team or who are employed by the scarecrow wing of Her Majesty’s right-wing press. Darren “Loki” McGarvey’s recent appearance provided some welcome relief from this Stepford procession of Canary Wharf habitues.

In recent years too, a grisly assortment of English “light entertainment” figures has begun to pop up with depressing regularity. To a man and woman they are possessed of the sort of Lahndin accents that make Ray Winstone sound like Sir John Gielgud. They are there to provide an “edge” to the show but the range of their political understanding extends all the way from Scooby-doo to Homer Simpson.

All that said Question Time remains the most compelling political show in the UK. Yet, you often find yourself pre-recording it so that you can watch it 15 minutes after the start time for the purposes of fast-forwarding it when the increasingly venomous moon-howlers in the audience begin stir.

Perhaps it’s a figment of my liberal imagination but large sections of the audience purportedly chosen to reflect a balanced cross-section of political views seem to be obsessed with immigration and benefit cheats and favour the Tory equivalent of Sharia Law in 21st-century Britain. I freely acknowledge here that my analysis may be distorted by my own political and social views.

What is not subject to distortion or subliminal liberal prejudices are the numbers of the BBC’s best-paid employees who had the benefit of a private education. Almost half of BBC staff earning more than £150k a year attended fee-paying establishments according to a survey conducted last year by Sky News. These chime with the annual figures released by the Sutton Trust on social mobility. Of the rest the vast majority attended grammar schools. Thus, influence at the state broadcaster is shared among a tiny cartel of privileged figures. It would be naïve to believe that they selflessly set aside their interests, prejudices and social networks when organising and managing the UK’s most important political programmes.

Perhaps it’s time to introduce an entirely new format in tune with the social and cultural reality of modern-day Britain. Let’s do away with a format that has hardly changed in almost four decades: mainly affluent, privileged and privately-educated panellists talking over each other while patronising audience members an alarmingly high number of whom seem to think they are auditioning for a the West End theatre production of Deliverance.

What about Ant and Dec’s Big Thursday Night Politics Takeaway? The panellists would each have a limited amount of time to put across their views on a host of hot social topics. I’d limit the time to 30 seconds in accordance with the political attention span of the anti-Johnny Foreigner brigade.

The audience would be given a touch-screen iPad to make an instant judgment and, whoosh, the most boring panel members would find their seats giving way beneath them and depositing them onto a water-slide. The last two panellists standing would compete in a Pointless style contest where you win points for choosing the most obscure answers to political posers such as: fill in the blanks to reveal the names of cabinet ministers and Prime Ministers whose families possess shares in dodgy off-shore tax havens. Let’s start with D-V-D C-M-R-N.

Or, how about producing a political Supermarket Sweep-style show in memory of the late, great Dale Winton? This would reflect the growing popularity of the food banks initiative which has been successfully rolled out across the country by the last two Tory administrations. Competing teams of politicians and social commentators would be asked to guess the price of everyday, household goods and comestibles. They would then be given the opportunity to race round an empty Waitrose store and fill their trolleys with groceries to donate to a food bank in their favourite working class neighbourhood. This would also enable the BBC to fulfil some of the social responsibility obligations of its Charter.

If BBC Scotland is serious about delivering some original political programming when its new digital service starts it should look at producing a Scottish version of Question Time. Of course, viewers would still have the opportunity to watch the boutique London production.

A version of the show produced in Scotland though, reflecting Scottish as well as UK and international issues could remind producers of the original Question Time what real diversity and an authentic cross-section of panellists and audience members ought to look like. I’d rotate the presentation duties between Loki, Angela Haggerty, Lesley Riddoch and Alex Massie just to, you know, keep things ticking over and everyone on their toes.

Okay now; the gentleman on the left at the back with the blue cagoule and the Burberry cap …